Wednesday, February 17, 2010

The fake universe of a cartoonist

Ravi Shankar is one of those cartoonists who just by the dint of being there for a long time become 'eminent'. He has an interesting style of drawing -but even a monkey can draw with practice. The art of cartooning has to with being genuinely funny, witty, sharp, intelligent, perspicacious...and Ravi Shankar is hardly ever that. He is also a moral idiot-

Kurdish villagers gave a series of emotional testimonies today in Saddam Hussein's genocide trial as they told of how the Iraqi dictator’s forces bombarded civilian villages with poisonous gas.

On the second day of the trial, after a chaotic opening in which Saddam refused to state his name or enter a plea, witnesses began to detail the savagery of the Anfal campaign which ran from 1987-88.

The prosecution alleges that up to 182,000 civilians were killed in air strikes, poison gas attacks and armed sweeps by Iraqi forces through designated "prohibited zones" in Kurdish regions.

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"On April 16, 1987 in the evening as the cattle were returning home and the sun was setting in the sky, about eight to 12 jets covered the sky," he began.

"The jets started firing on the villages of Belisand and Sheikwasan. The explosions were not very loud.

"There was greenish smoke from the bombs. It was if there was a rotten apple or garlic smell minutes later. People were vomiting... we were blind and screaming. There was no one to rescue us. Just God," he said.

Prosecutors said that a series of eight campaigns between February and August 1988 were aimed at driving Kurds from their homes into "collective villages" where Iraqi authorities could monitor them. Those who did not die in the military attacks were arrested, displaced, tortured or killed, the court was told.